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Saturday, May 16, 2015

Ethnic tensions spill onto Iranian soccer pitches

Against a backdrop of the violent redrawing of the map of
the Middle East as minorities assert their rights, rebels challenge the
existing order, and militant Islamists seek to carve up the post-colonial
order, Iranian soccer pitches are signalling that the Islamic republic is not
totally immune to the region’s upheaval.

To be sure, the territorial integrity of Iran which unlike
countries like Syria and Iraq boasts a strong state, rooted institutions, an
imperial history and a culture that dates back hundreds of years, is nowhere close to being called into question.

Yet, soccer fans in different parts of Iran populated by
ethnic minorities as well as protesters in Kurdish regions of the country are
demanding rights and in some cases hinting at a desire to break away from the
Islamic republic.

In the latest incident, soccer fans took this week to the
streets of Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan province, and other cities in
the province, according to opposition groups, in protest against what they see
as political interference in the Iranian Premier League final between Tractor
Sazi Tabriz FC, a symbol of Iranian Azeri identity, and Naft Tehran FC, owned
by the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to prevent the Azeri club from
clinching this year’s trophy.

The protests centre on a decision by the referee in the last
20 minutes of the game to give a red card to Traktor Sazi midfielder Andranik
Teymourian, which allowed Naft Tehran to turn defeat into a tie. ‘The
atmosphere within the stadium quickly shifted from celebratory to anger after
the referee’s call,” said Araz News operated by the National Resistance
Organization of Azerbaijan (NROA). It said throughout the game fans had been
chanting Azerbaijani nationalist slogans.

Southern Azerbaijan, another opposition website, said that
clashes with security forces erupted in the Sahand Sport Stadium and the streets
of Tabriz at the end of the match as protesters decried the alleged
manipulation of the match. Fan shouted ‘Stop Persian Racism, ‘’Down with
Islamic Republic,’ and ‘Long live Azerbaijan’ during the protests.

The website said Traktor Sazi had been playing defensive in
the last 20 minutes of the match because the team’s coach Tony Oliviera had
been informed by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Football Federation (IRIFF)
that the results of parallel matches meant that the Tabriz club would only need
a draw to win the championship. "We were tricked," Mr. Oliveira told
the official IRNA news agency.

Southern Azerbaijan said that mobile communications in the
stadium in the last minutes of the match had been disrupted. "We were
following the other game on television in the changing room but at 87 minutes
in, suddenly the TV, radio and cell phone networks blacked out and we had no
means of communication," Agence France Presse quoted Naft Tehran CEO Mansour
Ghanbarzadeh as saying.

East Azerbaijan governor Esmaeil Jabbarzadeh reportedly
conceded on television that the outcome of the match was questionable as he
called for calm.

Stadia in Tabriz have in recent years been the scene of a
number of environmental and nationalist protests and clashes with security
forces in which fans chanted secessionist slogans. “The main (Iranian concern)
is that the idea of Turkism is strengthening in South Azerbaijan,” News.Az, a
pro-Azeri news website, quoted Saftar Rahimli, a member of the board of the
World Azerbaijani Congress, as saying. Mr. Rahimli was referring to Eastern
Azerbaijan by its nationalist Azeri name.

Similarly, a soccer pitch in the Iranian city of Ahvaz, the
capital of the oil-rich southern province of Khuzestan and home to Iran’s Arab
minority, emerged last month as a flashpoint of anti-government protest at a
time of rising Arab-Iranian tensions over the status of Shiite Muslim
minorities in the Arab world, the crisis in Yemen, and the outlines of a
multilateral agreement that would curb Iran’s nuclear program and return the
Islamic republic to the fold of the international community. Teachers in Ahwaz
have since held anti-government protests.

Soccer fans clashed with security forces twice in recent
months in Ahwaz, the second time in April after a match between state-owned
Foolad FC and Teheran’s Esteghlal FC, according to the National Council of
Resistance in Iran, a coalition of opposition groups dominated by the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq,
a group that was tainted when it moved its operations in 1986 to Iraq at a time
that Iraq was at war with Iran after being expelled from France.

Ethnic Arabs have long complained that the government has
failed to reinvest oil profits to raise the region’s standards of living. The
World Health Organization (WHO) identified Ahwaz in 2013 as Iran’s most
polluted city.

Authorities distributed in February tens of thousands of
surgical masks and more than 26,000 gallons of milk in Ahvaz, a city of more
than 1 million, when it was hit by a severe sand storm that forced the closure
of schools and offices, the cancellation of flights, and prompted scattered
protests. Some Arab commentators have called against the backdrop of Saudi
Arabia and Iran fighting proxy wars in Syria, Iraq and Yemen for Iranian Arabs
to secede from the Islamic republic.

If soccer fans in East Azerbaijan and Khuzestan were not a
big enough headache for the government, police in the majority Kurdish city of
Mahabad sought earlier this month to quell riots after a 25 year-old hotel maid
died jumping from a fourth floor balcony as she tried to escape from an intelligence
official who was allegedly trying to rape her. Crowds mobilized by women’s
rights activists demanded answers refusing to be sent home with an announcement
that a civilian suspect had been taken into custody. Amateur video showed the
hotel allegedly being put on fire. One person was killed and 50 reportedly
injured in clashes with police.

Iranian Kurds concede that hopes that this month’s demonstrations
will ignite a wider spread protest are likely to prove wishful thinking with Kurdish
groups hopelessly divided even as Kurds in Iraq and Syria have carved out
entities of their own and the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) negotiates greater
rights for Kurds in Turkey with the government in Ankara.

“All of these parties are frozen in the past and completely
dependent on the Iraqi Kurds. They made no effort to create a clandestine
movement inside Iran, believing that the regime would implode. Their
calculation proved to be wrong,” Al-Monitor quoted Abbas Vali, a prominent
Istanbul-based Iranian Kurdish academic, as saying.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute
of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the
same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile